I went to boot this morning and I can't boot. The system does a disk check and does the first round of 5 checks and then restarts and keeps doing that. If I bypass the check I can't boot into my OS as the GDM is down for whatever reason.

I used Recovery CD which isn't really that great but it's test disk makes it appear that the problem is with the super block, which I guess is EXT2. I formated my whole drive EXT4 when I did my install. So how can I fix my super block without doing a reinstall?

Any help would be appreciated as I am using the live CD just to function and need to do work.

Can you boot from a Live Linux CD? If so, run gparted and tell us exactly what partitions you have or better yet, go into the file manager, mount the hard drive, open a terminal, type "mount" to see what device that hard drive got mounted to and then type "sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda" (or whatever the device name is for that drive).

PS: I gather your second frustrated post decrying the lack of GUI hardware tools for HD admin was a result of the frustration you are presently experiencing???

I finally gave up and I find it one of the rather disappointing things about Linux. If I can't fix something as stupid as a disk error, then what does that say for regular users who have no tech skills??

I am chalking it up to EXT4 and went back to EXT3 with a clean install. I can only imagine the hell that is going to occur when the next release of Ubuntu rears it's head and everyone who does a new install is switched to EXT4 if this kind of bug still exists.

The reality is that there was nothing wrong with my disk, the file system just got corrupted from not being shut down. That is just plain terrible. I have never had that happen with EXT3 or NTFS.

floweringmind wrote:I am chalking it up to EXT4 and went back to EXT3 with a clean install. I can only imagine the hell that is going to occur when the next release of Ubuntu rears it's head and everyone who does a new install is switched to EXT4 if this kind of bug still exists.

The reality is that there was nothing wrong with my disk, the file system just got corrupted from not being shut down. That is just plain terrible. I have never had that happen with EXT3 or NTFS.

That bug with ext4 is patched already, and will no doubt be included in any new distribution kernel version when ready..http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_HowtoUbuntu 9.04 and later include ext4 as a manual partitioning option at installation time, including support for ext4 as the root filesystem.

The blkid library is much better, and Debian uses the blkid library for util-linux. Unfortunately, Ubuntu chose to make this decision for some unknown reason. For other versions of Ubuntu, the patch that was applied can be found here.

I finally gave up and I find it one of the rather disappointing things about Linux. If I can't fix something as stupid as a disk error, then what does that say for regular users who have no tech skills??

Ext4 is still "beta" at the moment and rather than being one of the "disappointing things about Linux", this has actually proven the beauty of linux as the bug is now fixed... If one needs stability then always play safe and don't use beta!